Vierge à l'Enfant en majesté avec des saints

Ghirlandaio painted this around 1479, when he was a rising young master in Florence, a city then obsessed with perspective, real space and naturalistic backgrounds. For this altarpiece, made for the cathedral of San Martino in Lucca, he reached instead for something older. He seats the Madonna and Child on a high throne beneath a cloth of honour, saints standing to either side, and sets them all against a flat gold ground worked with a pattern of arches. That gold is the traditional signal for heaven, the kind of backdrop Florentine painters were just then leaving behind. The figures are arranged in the calm, face-to-face grouping the Italians called a sacra conversazione, a sacred conversation among holy people who in life never actually met.